A wife and mother trying to make sense of her world, one chocolate bar at a time…

Mother Bear and her cubs

I posted a couple of months ago about my struggles with my natural mothering instincts: A Mother’s Love In the post I described feeling a bit like a Mother Bear. This week I had another Mother Bear moment. Let me explain…

I am a bit of a weakling when it comes to confrontation and sticking up for myself and my children. It is a part of me that I don’t like; I know that I could and SHOULD be stronger in some situations for both them and me.

But this week I had a teeny tiny ‘ROAR’ incident; where I finally felt I tried to protect my children from a situation they shouldn’t have had to be in.

It was a glorious day, and I took the kids into town after school for an ice-cream and play at the park. They were beyond excited as Mummy doesn’t often DO the Park. Anyhows, the girls were playing and I was interacting with them in a way that only good parents should drinking a coffee.

There were children of various ages and other parents milling around, and a group of young teenagers near my girls were talking. I began to notice that they appeared to be ‘bullying’ another couple of kids. Some bad language was thrown about. One of the girls said ‘Oy, don’t use bad language, there are little children around’. The bad language stopped, but the intimidating behaviour continued, with both sides having a go.

All of a sudden, one of the girls pushed the other and a fight started.

Without thinking I yelled out in my best sensible mature Mum voice ‘Errr Excuse Me! Stop it now. My children are watching you and they are only 4 and 6 years old!’

(Now I know what you are thinking: Wow! Mrs HDC is one scary woman with that commanding talk…)

Well, luckily I didn’t have to say another word – the teenagers stopped fighting and half the group wandered off.

The girls carried on playing and I carried on watching them drinking my coffee.

Five minutes later, as we were leaving the park, the girl who started the fight began walking after us. The pathetic, daily-mail reader in me thought ‘Oh bugger, I am going to get stabbed by a teenager, I shouldn’t have said anything, bloody ‘Broken Britain’. I kept on walking with my head down.

The girl called after me ‘Excuse me, I just wanted to come to say that I am really sorry for doing what I did in front of your children. I really didn’t mean to.’

Well, I admit I was shocked and pleasantly surprised. I said ‘Thank you, I really appreciate that.’ The girls and I walked home and we talked about what had happened and I tried to use the incident to explain about bullying and how it is not nice etc. etc.

Now I am not silly. I am fully aware that the girls would have carried fighting on if I hadn’t said anything (hopefully someone else would have intervened as there were other parents around). And maybe I could have said more to the girl, when she apologised, about not bullying in the first place.

However, my instinct at that moment was to protect my children from seeing a horrible situation. Which I did it without thinking. And I felt a little bit proud of myself, and a little bit relieved that I do have that protective instinct which kicks in when it is truly needed.

I was a bit more ‘Roar’ than I was ‘Miaow’ and for me that was an achievement.

So back at home, to celebrate, I did what any good Mother Bear does, and spooned some Nutella direct from the jar with my big paws. Delish.

Oh, I can relate to this! I’m generally quite a quiet person, and certainly wouldn’t normally ‘have words’ with anyone, but I remember my own ‘ROAR’ moment when a boy on a bike rode around the corner out of a tunnel, narrowly avoiding colliding with my pram and few weeks old baby. Although he apologised, I felt the words ‘ That’s why you’re not supposed to ride bikes through the tunnel’ come pouring out! Sadly I don’t like Nutella, but I’m sure I rewarded myself very well 🙂 #KCACOLS

You did absolutely the right thing, I would have done the same! Well done for saying something, I find it difficult too so I know how proud of yourself you must be. I’m glad the girl apologised to you. #KCACOL